Introduction and Table of Contents
May 14, 2011
I am Robert Riversong, prophet [1], teacher, guide, midwife [2]
for a world struggling to be born.
You are a spark of the universal flame. Welcome to the journey.
Contents:
Latest Essays:
The Feminist Movement has Cannibalized Its Own Core Values and Become Its Own Worst Enemy
Insurance Industry Revelations and Prescriptions about Campus Sexual Assault
HELP for DOE Regulatory Excess – A Senate Task Force Report Recommends Scaling Back the Mountain of Regulations Strangling Higher Education Institutions
Two Over-Privileged Millennials Engage in Sex and Get F-cked – The Stanford “Model” Student and her Silicon Valley Mentor
A Model of Campus Gender-Based Harassment – The Columbia University “Mattress” Story
A Case Study in “Politically-Correct” Reactionary Response – The Duke Lacrosse Team Stripper Rape Hoax
When the Megaphone becomes the Gavel – Two legal experts on sex discrimination law and procedure argue that the current Title IX mandates for America’s colleges and universities are legally unsupportable and both practically and ethically indefensible.
All Sex is Rape – All Men are Rapists : Patriarchy = Rape Culture
Men are Twice-Raped – Domestically and Globally, Men and Boys are Victims of Sexual Violence at rates Equal to those of Women, and are Assumed to be Villains whenever a Woman Accuses
Two Sexual Assault Studies Contradict Stereotypes
New Puritanism – New Paternalism - The “Rape Culture” Narrative Demeans Women, Demonizes Men, and Turns Universities into Witch Hunt Tribunals
All Essays
Rites, Rights, Writes of Passage
Altimeter Readers and Parachute Packers
Out of Equilibrium – Into the Maelstrom
Crossing the Threshold – Charles Eisenstein
A More than Human World – David Abrams
The Danger of Normality: From the Ideal to the Normal – From Diversity to Abnormality
The Greening and UnGreening of the World
What Does “Green” Really Mean?
A New Green History of the World – Clive Ponting
Health Impacts of a Grain-Based Agriculture
1493: The Reknitting of Pangaea
Gaia and the Dying of Anima Mundi – Animate Earth, Stephan Harding
Collision Course with the Future – based on Gus Speth’s The Bridge at the Edge of the World
The Lost Language of Plants – Stephen Harrod Buhner
The Thermodynamics of an Intelligent Living Universe
Electro-Pollution May be the Greatest Threat to the Biosphere
The End of the World – Bibliography of Collapse
How to Survive the Crash and Save the Earth – Ran Prieur
Wendell Berry’s Criteria for Appropriate Technology
History, Politics, Science & Religion
The Luddite Tradition or The Critique of the Technological Paradigm – a bibliography
Science & Religion – Locking Horns
Ebola as Metaphor: The Ebola Virus Threatens Human Claims to Evolutionary Superiority
History of US Government Surveillance
America was Born of Conspiracy Theory – From the Declaration of Independence to 9/11
Civil War: The Conquest of Agrarianism by Industrialism
The Right of Secession – Lincoln as Tyrant
Economic Secession – War Tax Resistance
Short History of Property, Labor, Wealth, Profit & Taxation
The Myth of Corporate Personhood
Five essays on the takeover of American democracy by corporations and how we can – and must – take it back for We the People.
- The Pernicious Fiction of Corporate Personhood
- Corporations are Not People
- Justice Lewis Powell and the Rise of the Corporate State
- “A Constant Preference of Public to Private Interest”
- The People’s Rights Amendment
Network Marketing is NOT the same as Networking
Algorithms and Red Wine: Is the ‘Digital Hive’ a Soft Totalitarian State? and Bitter Tales from the Massive White Underclass – by Joe Bageant
On the Perennial Conflict in Palestine:
Israel’s War on Hamas – Israel’s War against Peace
An Illustrated History of Palestine
Zionism and Nazism – and Israeli Support for War Criminals and Human Rights Abusers
Men, Women and the Gender War:
Misandric Feminism vs. Progressive Gender Equality (excerpt of above)
Male Victims of Sexual Violence (also an excerpt of the first essay)
Yellow Journalism and the Meme of “Rape Culture” – Rolling Stone and U-VA Gang Rape
Dear President Sullivan – letter from 17 attorneys involved with campus sexual assault claims throughout America, detailing specific reasons why they “are concerned that the University’s Proposed Student Sexual Misconduct Policy is both vastly over inclusive in attempting to define prohibited conduct and ill equipped to guarantee a procedure for resolving allegations that is fair and impartial”.
It’s Time for a U-VA Apology - Op-Ed from a 25-year U-VA professor and his U-VA junior son
Journalistic Fabulism and Ideological Agendas - the Sabrina Rubin Erdely Story
New Puritanism – New Paternalism - The “Rape Culture” Narrative Demeans Women, Demonizes Men, and Turns Universities into Witch Hunt Tribunals
Dear Senators – letter from 20 attorneys critical of the Campus Accountability and Safety Act (S. 2692)
Sexual Assault and Justice: Can we reconcile the belated attention to rape on campus with due process? by Nancy Gertner, feminist lawyer, retired federal judge and Harvard Law professor
The Pendulum Reverses – Again - The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses & Men Strike Back against Title IX Tribunals
HELP for DOE Regulatory Excess – A Senate Task Force Report Recommends Scaling Back the Mountain of Regulations Strangling Higher Education Institutions
Men are Twice-Raped – Domestically and Globally, Men and Boys are Victims of Sexual Violence at rates Equal to those of Women, and are Assumed to be Villains whenever a Woman Accuses
Two Sexual Assault Studies Contradict Stereotypes
All Sex is Rape – All Men are Rapists : Patriarchy = Rape Culture
A Model of Campus Gender-Based Harassment – The Columbia University “Mattress” Story
A Case Study in “Politically-Correct” Reactionary Response - The Duke Lacrosse Team Stripper Rape Hoax
When the Megaphone becomes the Gavel – Two legal experts on sex discrimination law and procedure argue that the current Title IX mandates for America’s colleges and universities are legally unsupportable and both practically and ethically indefensible.
Two Over-Privileged Millennials Engage in Sex and Get F-cked – The Stanford “Model” Student and her Silicon Valley Mentor
Insurance Industry Revelations and Prescriptions about Campus Sexual Assault
The Feminist Movement has Cannibalized Its Own Core Values and Become Its Own Worst Enemy
America’s Gun Culture
Lead, Crime & Societal Breakdown – A Cautionary Tale of Unintended Consequences
Guns, Race, the Law & Public Opinion – The Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman Case
Ceremonial Violence – School Rampage Shootings
District of Columbia v. Heller – A Radical Decision that Created a Middle Path
Cliven Bundy – Folk Hero or Scapegoat?
The Isla Vista Rampage & The Abuse of Tragedy for Ideological Agendas
Trouble in the Heartland – Ferguson MO
On the 50th anniversary of the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy:
The Coup d’État against JFK: The CIA Killed Peace in 1963
JFK & Fidel Castro – The Promise of Revolutionary Co-Existence
CIA Conspiracy to Kill JFK – from JFK and the Unspeakable
Mark Lane’s Brief in Defense of Lee Harvey Oswald
The JFK Assassination – Official Complicity
The JFK Assassination – Inconsistencies with the Lone Gunman Theory
JFK – The Assassin’s Rifle & The “Magic Bullet”
Assassination Science Exposes Official Complicity & Cover-Up and Names the Assassins
JFK Assassination Plan A – The Chicago Plot
The (Too) Many Faces of Lee Harvey Oswald
The Strange and Revelatory Saga of Rose Cheramie
The Threads of Conspiracy Unravel
L. Fletcher Prouty’s Letter to Jim Garrison (an insider’s exposé of the CIA)
RFK – The Other Kennedy Assassination
My other blogs are:
Riversong HouseWright – A Home for Sensible Homes (Riversong’s Radical Reflections on Shelter)
aVERT – a Vertical Emergency Response Training
Notes:
[1] There is a generalized misperception in these modern, “post-prophetic” days about what it means to be a prophet. The most common misunderstanding is that it displays some kind of arrogance to label oneself a “prophet”. But nothing could be further from the truth.
One does not decide to become a prophet, as one might choose to take on a profession. One is given the role by the Spirit of the Universe, and can choose only to accept it in humility or to reject one’s destiny. The calling often comes in the midst of some sort of Vision Quest, as it did in my case. And to accept the role of seeing and describing what most cannot see, are afraid to confront, and spend their lives in hiding from, is to accept being an outcast. As it has been said, a prophet is never welcome in his own time.
But I was also born into a prophetic tradition. My direct lineal ancestor, Yaakov Yitzchak of Lublin (in what is now Poland but was then part of Bohemia), also known as the Choseh (seer or visionary) of Lublin (1745-1815), is considered to be among the greatest of Hebrew prophets, on par with the biblical Isaiah. And I have always accepted my destiny regardless of the personal cost.
An essay which expands on my own understanding of the role of prophet in the modern world is Of Prophets and Hope.
[2] Socrates, through the writings of Plato, understood that knowledge was eternal and available to every soul, that the trauma of birth causes a forgetting, and that only through an act of anamnesis (from Greek ana “back” + mimneskesthai “call to mind”) can we remember what we always knew.
The Socratic method, then, was a means of helping others re-member their dis-membered soul, of giving birth to the eternal knowledge (logos) that was corrupted by our bodily birth – and therefore a true teacher or guide is but a midwife, assisting in the rebirth of what was always most deeply and eternally real.
Knowledge, as differentiated from “true belief” (doxa, “opinion”) and from dogma (imposed belief), can be achieved through katharsis (“cleansing” or “purification”), by contemplating with the soul (noesis), and experiencing gnosis (spiritual knowing). This is somewhat like the maxim of Sherlock Holmes: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
As a midwife in the Socratic sense, I do not traffic in mere opinions (doxa), challenge any and all beliefs (dogma), and accept as true only that which can be directly and immediately known – what some today call Heart Knowledge.
